Explosion and fire strike Quaker Oats plant in downtown Cedar Rapids

An explosion tore through the rear of the Quaker Oats cereal mill in downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Saturday evening, igniting a fire that sent a column of black smoke over the city and backed up traffic on Interstate 380 for more than an hour. No one was hurt, according to city officials and the plant's owner, PepsiCo Inc., though the cause remained unknown as crews worked into the night to extinguish hot spots inside the century-old building.

A blast on the building's back side

The Cedar Rapids Fire Department said crews were dispatched at 4:44 p.m. Saturday to the north side of the plant, a part of the complex facing away from I-380 that is used to move product between buildings. Firefighters arriving at the scene found signs that an explosion had preceded the fire, according to local coverage from KWWL and KCRG-TV9. Mayor Tiffany O'Donnell told reporters at the scene that the fire broke out in a part of the plant that is not heavily staffed.

Fire officials said the blaze was considered under control by 6:15 p.m., though crews remained inside past 6:30 p.m. doing overhaul work and checking for hot spots. Mutual aid came from fire departments in Marion and Hiawatha and from Linn County, along with area ambulance crews; two Cedar Rapids hospitals prepared to receive patients but were not needed, KWWL reported. Traffic backed up on I-380, which runs past the mill through the heart of downtown, for more than an hour during the response.

"The headline here, though, no injuries, thank God," Mayor Tiffany O'Donnell said, adding that all employees had gotten out safely and were accounted for.

PepsiCo, which has owned the Quaker brand since 2001, said in a statement reported by ABC News that it was grateful to first responders and that the cause of the fire would be investigated. "We can confirm all employees are accounted for," the company said. Neither the fire department nor PepsiCo had identified a cause as of Saturday night.

The world's largest cereal mill

The Cedar Rapids facility, completed in 1927 on the bank of the Cedar River, is frequently described by the company and local officials as the largest cereal mill in the world, processing more than two million pounds of oats a day and supplying ingredients used in roughly seven in ten Quaker products sold anywhere. A company feature on PepsiCo's newsroom, published earlier this year, profiled workers at the plant and described the Cedar Rapids site as central to how oats grown across the Midwest and Canada become the company's breakfast products. Estimates of the plant's workforce have varied over the years, with local reporting putting the figure between roughly 740 and 1,000 employees.

The mill has weathered serious disruption before. In June 2008, catastrophic flooding along the Cedar River forced PepsiCo to shut the plant down entirely; in a press release issued at the time, the company said it carried insurance covering both the facility and the resulting business interruption and that it expected weeks of disrupted service while engineers assessed the damage. The plant reopened and has remained one of the city's most visible employers, its red rooftop sign — rebuilt with LEDs after a 2020 derecho — a fixture of the Cedar Rapids skyline.

A history of fires and federal scrutiny

Saturday's explosion was not the first at the site. A 1905 blast and fire at the mill's predecessor, the North Star Milling Company, killed two workers and led to a rebuilding that produced the plant's current scale. More recently, a 2009 fire that started in a fifth-floor dust collector left three workers needing treatment for smoke inhalation, and a 2018 fire that began in an oven on the plant's tenth floor caused no injuries.

Federal regulators have also examined conditions inside the mill. A 2012 survey by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, evaluated engineering controls at the Cedar Rapids facility after concerns about exposure to diacetyl and related flavoring chemicals used in syrup processing. Investigators found that most measured exposure levels were below proposed federal limits, with one exception: readings in a fifth-floor syrup room exceeded the thresholds the agency had recommended at the time. The report made no finding related to fire or explosion risk, and it is not known whether its findings bear any relation to Saturday's incident.

Workers who were inside the plant Saturday afternoon were evacuated from the affected section and accounted for without injury, officials said. Residents and passersby downtown described hearing or feeling the blast before seeing smoke rise from the building. "Quaker Oats is a staple of this town, so we don't want them to blow up," one resident, Dan Gardner, told ABC News. A visitor from Texas, Emilio Esquivel, said he was startled to see dark smoke pouring from the building from his hotel window.

What happens next

Fire officials said Saturday night that the cause remained under investigation and gave no timeline for determining it. PepsiCo has not said whether the affected section will remain closed or how, if at all, the fire might affect production at a plant the company has called one of its most important milling operations in North America. The city has not announced any broader safety review of the facility, and no evacuation of surrounding downtown blocks was ordered during or after the response.

Cedar Rapids officials said Saturday that limited operations were continuing elsewhere in the building even as crews worked to fully extinguish the fire. Longer term, the incident is likely to draw renewed attention to safety conditions at a mill that has operated on the same stretch of riverfront, through fires, floods and rebuilding, for more than a century.